At South Dallas’ Oakland Cemetery, life after death has a new meaning amid a field of resilient post oak trees, wildflowers and long-stem prairie grasses.
Five years after a group of volunteers stepped in to save the cemetery from permanent closure, work has been underway to extend the lifespan of a site that’s home to scores of the city’s earliest residents and pioneers.
“We’re 47 acres of non-tax land in the middle of Dallas,” said Monica Newbury, the cemetery’s chief administrator. “Creating a place that we can actually give back to the community once burials have slowed down and stopped is really important,” she said.
Their latest project takes people back to when someone visiting a grave over a century ago would have seen 2-inch-tall grasses such as little Bluestem, Sideoats Grama and Red Lovegrass, and wildflowers like Texas Bluebonnets.
Naturalists and the park’s caretakers are investing time and resources in restoring a 5-acre patch of Post Oak Savannah and Blackland Prairie, remnants of an endangered ecosystem of tall grasses and wildflowers on which Dallas and its suburbs grew. Less than 1% of what used to be the Blackland prairie exists today. 
The work, associated with a two-year pilot program called the Constellation of Living Memorials, could open the cemetery to new kinds of grants traditionally reserved for parkland and nature reserves. Oakland Cemetery is one of five cemeteries that first joined the program to restore neglected cemeteries, and was inspired by Warren Ferris Cemetery’s resurgence as a wildlife refuge.
The more than 130-year-old cemetery, off Malcolm X Boulevard, is home to more than 27,000 graves. Its inhabitants mark chapters in the city’s history. From the graves of Confederate soldiers and former mayors such as Henry Ervay, whose names are memorialized in street names and signs all over the city, to families who lived in West Dallas and Little Mexico, the cemetery holds all shades of the city’s past.
It’s also the final resting place of 12-year-old Santos Rodriguez, who was killed in 1973 by a Dallas police officer.
When the cemetery fell into disrepair, plant growth cut off public access to parts of it. It was difficult to spot headstones that were merely 10 feet away.
Together, with at least 10 volunteers working on the cemetery at any given time, workers have cleared off acres of privet, an invasive plant that spreads fast and is a known offender in greenbelts and trail systems, much to the chagrin of maintenance workers. Thick outcroppings choke off nutrients for its neighboring trees and become a safety nightmare.
Every volunteer at the Oakland Cemetery has a story to tell.
Jeffrey Martin, one of the original volunteers, came to pay his respects at his best friend’s grave. They had known each other for 34 years. For Newbury, it was a search for the burial place of great grandmother, who passed away in 1918 from the Spanish flu.
She would soon discover her great-grandparents on both sides of the family — paternal and maternal — are buried in the cemetery, as were several generations of her family dating to 1897.
A couple of years ago, she buried her father there. 
In April, the cemetery celebrated the placement of a historical marker on the grounds. The designation is just one item on a wish list of things they’d like to take care of. The list includes a potential office remodel and outreach to funeral directors across the city to let them know the cemetery is still active.
For months, a partnership with the Native Plant Society has been bringing students to the site for class projects, where they learn about different kinds of bugs, grasses, fungi and trees. In the process, several have stumbled upon or unearthed unmarked graves.
“This is a cemetery where people come to mourn their dead, but there’s so much life here,” Newbury said.
A living, breathing cemetery
One November morning, Michael Puttonen, Martin and Rusty, the cemetery’s cherished protector, joined Newbury.
Puttonen, a North Texas master naturalist, surveyed a no-mow section that had been cordoned off in the back of the cemetery.
When the weather permits, tiny birds can be seen flocking to native plants, nibbling on seeds. Volunteers have also created the Oakland Memorial Meadow right next to it. It’s a 10,000-square-foot wildflower meadow. It’s dedicated to 300 victims of a meningitis epidemic that spread across the state between 1911 and 1913, whose individual unmarked graves are buried underneath. Newbury said nobody thought to lay headstones because they worried that if the ground broke for some reason, the disease could spread.
“We’re still working on ideas,” Newbury said, “but we want to put something in the middle (of the meadow) that people can go and actually read about the meningitis outbreak, that lists all of the names that have people that are buried here.”
Just another thing volunteers could fundraise for, Newbury said. “We want something here that lets people know this is more than just a blank space,” Newbury said.
Newbury said the group is now looking for funding to help restore and preserve unique headstones scattered across the cemetery. One of the statues belongs to John McCoy, the first attorney to practice law in Dallas County. He came to Texas in 1845, just a couple of years after John Neely Bryan founded the city.
“What we do here as volunteers is mostly cleaning, not really restoration work,” Newbury said, pointing at a red sandstone monument, the only one of its kind. “It’s crumbling away,” she said.
Fundraising is an everyday affair. The nonprofit averaged about $90,000 in expenses annually, and includes everything from gasoline to having tree trunks taken down. “We’re constantly fundraising and trying to make money to meet our basic needs,” she said.
In several areas, volunteers have planted post oak seedlings to replace the ancient trees nearing the end of their natural lifespan.
Puttonen said several of the trees dated to a time before even the cemetery was founded. Researchers found notes from the original architect that showed builders bulldozed everything except the post oak trees, he said, putting the trees at roughly 150-180 years old.
“These trees are irreplaceable,” he said. “Once they’re gone, they’re gone,” he said.
